In an article to be published in the journal Psychological Science, a publication of the Association for Psychological Science, psychological scientist Michaela Dewar and her colleagues show that memory can be boosted by taking a brief wakeful rest after learning something verbally new—so keep the pencil for phone numbers- and that memory lasts not just immediately but over a longer term.

And:

In one study, the participants were asked to recall both stories half an hour later and then a full week later. Participants remembered much more story material when the story presentation had been followed by a period of wakeful resting.

Dewar explains that there is growing evidence to suggest that the point at which we experience new information is "just at a very early stage of memory formation and that further neural processes have to occur after this stage for us to be able to remember this information at a later point in time."